One financial-industry attorney recalled the time he told a room full of bankers that if the real estate market ever wobbled, a part of the land-cycle roulette that always comes up, everyone in Phoenix was going down.
"For a long moment, there was a chilly silence in the room. Everyone just stared at me," said the lawyer. "Then they all started laughing."
Another gentleman told me, without a hint of irony, that he saw $10,000 bribes used to cook deals all the time.
In 1988, a cover story in Barron's said the wild and woolly real estate business in Phoenix was going to collapse of its own excess. The writer was viciously attacked by local civic leaders. It marked the last flatulent bellow of those old rous in French cuffs: Gary Driggs, Karl Eller, Keith Turley and Gene Rice.
It was a cynical time, but here's the bottom line: None of the S&L gangsters used their own money. They did it with your savings accounts, your passbook certificates and your pension funds.
It was always your money that was in play.
And when hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared down the sinkhole of the '80s, taxpayers were asked to make up the loss.
As a line of business, it was cooler than a briefcase full of a white, powdery substance.
And Fife's bloody palm prints are all over the satchel.
Oh, he's washed his hands, all right, but he didn't use Lava. The towels at Symington's feet look like a stack of maxipads.
First Symington screwed the people who banked at Southwest Savings. Then he conned the construction workers out of their pensions.
Once he was elected governor, he targeted state employees with Project SLIM. (Funny, I don't ever hear tell about clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles traipsing through Europe on either their trust funds or our state monies. I'm sure it happens; I just don't hear about it.)
Fife Symington has made a career out of mugging the working man. It's genetic with him. And before we're done, mark my words, this bankruptcy of his will turn out to be one more hustle.
He is beautiful.
He is Le Big Mac.
Who's Zed? Zed's Dead, Baby. Zed'sDead.
It is a mind-altering thing to wake up in the morning and be able to read, in the NewYork Times and the Washington Post, 35,000 words by the Unabomber, and yet not be able to get a straight answer from Fife Symington or the local press about the governor's highly pungent bankruptcy and the squandered millions in pensioners savings. The Arizona Republic's publisher, Chip Weil, thinks it is our civic responsibility to let Fife Symington skate. Not everyone agrees.
Morley Safer from 60 Minutes is in town to interview Symington. Come one Sunday down the line, there will be a watch up the governor's butt, ticking.
Whatever happens from here on out is a matter of details. I know what Fife Symington did.
And me, I don't dig on swine.
He's past tense in my book.
Years from now, my children will read about the real estate plundering and looting of the S&Ls in the '80s the way I read about Henry Frick when I was a kid.
And my boys will ask questions.
They'll say, "Who was Fife?"
And I'll tell them.
"Fife's dead, baby. Fife's dead."--Lacey
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